Kitty closed her eyes and sighted the peaks as if she were getting the color scheme for an afternoon toilet.

“Mass, bulk, rather than line—­no, it’s not like a drop-curtain, but it’s distinctly ‘hand-painted.’  All it needs is a stag surveying the prospect from that great cliff.  It’s the kind of thing that would sound well in a description.  Oh, I assure you I intend to make lavish use of it, but it leaves nothing to one’s poor imagination!”

Peter had a distinct feeling of being annoyed.  No, she could not appreciate the mountains any more than they could appreciate her.  They were incongruous, antipathetic, antipodal.  Kitty, in her pink and white and flaxen prettiness and her trim habit, was in harmony with the bridle-path of a city park; in this great, lonely country she was an alien.  He thought of Judith and the night they had climbed Horse-Thief Trail, of her quiet endurance, her keen pleasure in the wild beauty of the night, her quality of companionship, her loyalty, her silent bearing of many burdens.  Yet until he had seen them both against the same relentless background, he had never been conscious of comparing the two women.

Nannie Wetmore had fallen behind.  She was riding with a bronzed young lieutenant from Fort Washakie.  The two ahead rode long without speaking.  Then Peter broke the silence impatiently: 

“You did not really mean that, did you?” He was boyishly hurt at her flippant summing up of his beloved blue country.  And Kitty, tired with the long, hard ride, and missing that something in Peter that had always been hers, turned on him a pair of blue eyes in which the tears were brimming suspiciously.  They were well out of sight of the others, and had come to the heavy fringes of a pine wood.  Was it the psychological moment at last?  Then suddenly their horses, that had been sniffing the air suspiciously, stopped.  Kitty’s horse, which was in advance of Peter’s, rushed towards the thicker growth of pines as if all Bedlam were in pursuit.  Peter’s horse, swerving from the cause of alarm, bolted back across the trail over which they had just made their way.  A large brown bear, feeding with her cub, and hidden by the trees till they were directly in front of her, had caused the alarm.

And presently the hush of the shadowy green world in which Judith lay was broken by a light, sobbing sound.  It had been so still that, lying on her bed of pine-needles, she had likened it to great waves of silence, rolling up from the valley, breaking over her and sweeping back again, noiseless, green from the billowing ocean of pine branches, and sunlit.  Judith bent over the rocky ledge and saw a girl making her way down the game trail, dishevelled and tearful.  Her hat was gone, her pale-yellow hair, that in shadow had the greenish tinge of corn-silk, blew about her shoulders, her trim skirt was torn and dusty, and she looked about, bewildered, hardly realizing that through the unexpected course of things she had been stranded in this great world of sunlit splendor and loneliness.  She closed her eyes.  The awful vastness and solitude oppressed her with a deepening sense of calamity.  Suppose they never found her?  How could she find her way in this endless wilderness, afoot?  She sank to the turf and began to cry hysterically.